Film-maker Robin Campillo has surrendered to the flow of memory and given us this wonderful, personal movie, created with tenderness, unsentimental artistry and visual flair, inspired by his own childhood growing up on a French army base in recently independent Madagascar in the early 1970s. It is the story of an imaginative little kid spying and eavesdropping on the private lives of grownups, which are a mystery to him and a mystery to the grownups, too. Red Island elides his own poignant growing pains with Madagascar’s emergence from the infantilised colonial state. It feels like a classic depiction of childhood on film.
Twelve years after its establishment as an independent republic in 1960, Madagascar still permits the presence of the French army to assist the national authorities. This has clearly become a plum posting for France’s military personnel: an island paradise (far more pleasant in their eyes than Algeria or Morocco) in which the actual business of governing, the heavy lifting of what Kipling called the white man’s burden, has effectively been passed on to the former imperial subjects.
The French army officers are left with a fair bit of time to spend with their wives and children at enjoyable parties, barbecues and beach trips, and to flirt with other people’s spouses; a bit of a White Mischief atmosphere, in fact, combined with a little of Stepford for those new young wives on base who are not yet accustomed to how things work. Military professionalism and alertness is mixed with erotic languor and boredom. Robert (Quim Gutiérrez) is the alpha male in his group, married to Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz); their bright, watchful little eight-year-old son Thomas (Charlie Vauselle) is always hiding in corners or under the dining table, peeping at things he doesn’t understand – getting little glimpses, fragments, vignettes of grownup existence. He doesn’t get to be a go-between, or intervene in any meaningful way in their lives, but when he’s not spying, he’s reading about Fantômette, the superhero, whose adventures are dramatised in dreamlike inserts. Actually dressing up as this masked crime-fighter is to trigger a mysterious, almost occult change in the weather.
Little Thomas gets a best friend, a Vietnamese girl called Suzanne (Cathy Pham), and together they roam far afield, on foot or on bikes, with that weightless freedom of childhood. They venture into the very strange bamboo Lovers’ Wood, a shadowy place where couples are to be seen kissing – it is forbidden love that is presented to them everywhere. Thomas is to be the intimate witness to the marital breakdown of a new young couple on base, Bernard (Hugues Delamarlière) and Odile (Luna Carpiaux). Robert hosts a boozy get-together at which Thomas gazes through the mottled glass in a door, and Campillo makes the swarming, fragmented glass images very like the design of an aragonite table which Robert has recently bought. (Despite his machismo, Robert has an eye for design and décor and actually designs a ring for his wife with two gemstones his son buys from a travelling salesman.)
Nettled at his wife dancing with someone else, Robert dances suggestively with Odile. Does this obscurely cause a crisis? Perhaps. Bernard is to have a breakdown, caused by heavy drinking (he collapses at a grand party given for the general, a fascinating scene) and he has a scandalous affair with Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), a woman from the brothel near the base. To return to the Kiplingesque British idiom, Bernard has gone native, and the existence of this flaunted liaison challenges the hypocrisy and racism that is never far from the surface. Staggeringly, Bernard is made to undergo an exorcism by the worldly, weatherbeaten priest on base, Père Bertin (Vincent Schmitt); this casting out of demons is actually a casting-in of neuroses, a huge groupthink nervous breakdown on the part of the white officer class.
There are glorious setpieces; perhaps especially Robert’s rash decision to buy three baby crocodiles and give them to his children. But the family’s time at the island is to come to an end; a strange epochal moment comes when Thomas dresses up in the homemade Fantômette costume that his mother makes for him and appears directly to Miangaly as the crime-fighting avenger. This ushers in a new section of the film featuring the insurgent, confident Malagasy people themselves. Red Island might be compared to Albert Serra’s Pacifiction – a cheese dream of French imperial tristesse – but without the self-indulgence. It’s a compelling, visually exquisite piece of work.
• Red Island screened at the San Sebastián film festival and is in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 1 March.
